BAYREUTH, Germany — It has taken some doing, but the Norwegian stage director Stefan Herheim has transformed Parsifal, at the Bayreuth Festival, into a parable of modern German history.

On paper, Wagner’s first act is about some medieval knights who guard the Holy Grail, the legendary cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. Their leader, Amfortas, suffers from a wound that won’t heal, punishment for a night of pleasure with the demon-possessed Kundry.

The evil sorcerer Klingsor took that opportunity to stab Amfortas with his own spear, supposedly the same one that pierced Jesus on the cross, and to steal it. Amfortas, and the weakened community of knights, can be healed only by “a pure fool made wise by suffering” -- who finally materializes in the person of Parsifal.

Set designer Heike Scheele opens the Bayreuth production in an upper-class, early German-Empire home, circa 1880, with period costumes by Gesine Völlm.

In a miraculous bed in the middle, Parsifal’s bloody birth gets enacted, and later quite a number of characters appear and disappear here. I’m not sure why so many of them sport dark wings, unless incarnating aspects — variously power-hungry, weakened, noble and wanton -- of a nation represented by an eagle.

For the second act, we get not Klingsor’s castle and magic gardens but a wartime hospital. Wagner’s Flowermaidens are rendered as Red Cross nurses and Las Vegas showgirls, whose “services,” ahem, extend well beyond traditional medicine. Momme Hinrichs and Torge Moller supply background videos of armies marching to war. Nazi flags and swastikas and worried-looking refugees are de rigueur shockers.

The last act opens in postwar ruins. Gurnemanz is presented as an old soldier to whom Parsifal appears as an out-of-this-world medieval knight. Here, and in the ensuing baptism and foot washing, Herheim actually sticks fairly closely to Wagner’s design. But the final scene is updated to today’s Reichstag, a huge mirror simulating the downward view from architect Norman Foster’s dome.

Somehow, the opera’s redemptive message comes through all this, but only just. This is a production with way too many ideas.

Apart from Kwangchul Youn’s dignified, richly resonant Gurnemanz, the singing is capable if not particularly distinguished. Burkhard Fritz has the decibels for Parsifal, if not a wished-for warmth. Susan Maclean certainly personifies Kundry’s multiple personalities, at one point looking like a silver-haired Marlene Dietrich. Thomas Jesatko’s Klingsor is half a drag queen: white tie and tails above, fishnet stockings below. Detlef Roth wobbles aptly as Amfortas.

At least on Wednesday, the stars of the show were conductor Philippe Jordan, whom some may remember from his 2005 Dallas Symphony concerts, and the festival orchestra. Elegantly tinted and delineated, the score’s many delicacies have never seemed so transcendent. Eberhard Friedrich’s chorus was again superb.

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About Scott Cantrell

Also writing occasionally about art and architecture, Scott came to The News in 1999, after 10 years at the Kansas City Star and previous positions at newspapers in Albany and Rochester, N.Y. A former president of the Music Critics Association of North America and two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for music journalism, he has also written for The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and magazines including Gramophone, BBC Music, Opera, Opera News and Symphony Magazine. He has performed as an organist and choral conductor and taught music history at the State University of New York at Albany. He enjoys eating all too much, his tastes ranging from barbecue, collard greens and fried okra to French cuisine and fiery Indian food.